Leaving London

Leaving London

There were nights when I enjoyed watching her sleep.

Nights when I would lie awake for hours, just looking. Long hours when
I would forget to curse my insomnia, but was instead grateful for it
because it let me watch her. For as I watched, all the clich?s of
sleep's restorative powers would play out across her body: the
stresses, neuroses and affectations that characterised her awake would
slide away, and smoothness would flow through her like water. From
slack brow, to open mouth, slipping across arms outstretched, whirl
pooling around her breasts; smoothness sloshed gently down her broad
chest, down to where it formed a tiny pool of calm in her (inward)
belly button.

On the best of those nights I would even dare to dip a finger into the
smooth, barely touching so as not to wake her, tracing down the dorsal
divide of her body. Light as I could, I'd draw my reverent digit across
the centre of her chest - the valley of the shadow of breasts, as I
christened it one happy Sunday afternoon. I would slide my finger up
and down her, a wee pinkie pilgrim wading in the shallows of her
sleep.

Up and down, until the tickling would rouse her subconscious; until her
nose would twitch, her head shake, and then, still asleep, but knowing
that I was the cause of the disturbance and knowing what it would take
to stop me, she'd roll closely, and let me sink into her. With
permission thus imputed, I'd burrow my head in, my crown pressed into
the valley, hoping to acquire via osmosis, via sweat, her secret skill
of sleep.

I can remember such nights, but tonight does not seem to be one of
them.

My current inability to sleep at all, still less to take solace from
her slumber, could be attributable to a number of factors: it could be
because of the cheese sauce I had at dinner; or because of the fight we
had over dinner; or (and this is perhaps most likely) because in the
morning I leave London, seconded to a case six thousand miles away, for
no one is quite sure how many long months. And I haven't told her
yet.

*

My maternal (English) great grand-father, like many youngest sons of
his generation and class, was dispatched to India to make something of
himself. He succeeded rather fabulously, building a Jewellery Empire
(which still exists) on the simple practice of duping a number of
Maharajas, quite literarily, out of their family jewels and re-selling
those gems, at vastly inflated prices, to wealthy Victorian ladies back
in England.

He and my great-grandmother were married for 42 years, 29 of which, the
first 29 of which, they spent apart, he in India for nine months of
each year, she remaining at the family hump in Hampshire.

Despite this (and despite the persistent rumours of his harem of native
wives), they seemed to regard their marriage as a complete success -
and proved it quite resoundingly in the language of progeny, spawning
no less than seven offspring, conceived with clock work precision over
14 years, during (one presumes) his annual return to the old country.
The math of this, 7 children over 14 years, has always fascinated me.
Did the old man find his aging white wife's flesh quite so repulsive,
after his regular diet of honey skinned, mango breasted beauties, that
he could only bring himself to touch her once each alternating summer?
Or where they at it like Viagra doused rabbits the whole time, but
practicing some bizarre form of Victorian contraception - worsted wool
French letters, dried dog pills, coitus spankus interruptus - in order
to keep the brood down to manageable proportions?

Even as I thought of my distant ancestor, though, I knew that his
reality was not mine; and that in this day and age our too highly
honed, over thought, over articulated, over alymcbealed perceptions of
what relationships should be like, create a far more heady maelstrom
for two people to seek, still less maintain, clarity of passion with
each other. Even whilst in the same city, let alone when separated by
the Indian Ocean.

For Fiona and I, two 29 year olds, in the 22nd month of a relationship
at a crux point, my leaving the country for an open ended period of
months, would be nothing less than a death blow. If I had consulted
her, if we had an engagement or a proposal to bind us together through
the distance and time, then maybe the relationship would find a way to
survive. But I hadn't, and we didn't, and it wouldn't.

Thank god.

Don't be confused, this is what it is: I care for Fiona a great deal.
It's the relationship I hate; and Fiona herself will survive this quite
well. Perhaps she will become a bit bitterer; perhaps a bit more wary,
but those things are part of the deal of love risk in 21st century
life. Ultimately, Fiona will be fine. It is the Relationship itself
that I was targeting in this clinical strike, and I was certain this
would kill it dead.

And not a second too soon: the Relationship had just got to the stage
where it had acquired a capital 'R', and its own life, its own voice,
quite distinct from either of ours. A voice in which the Relationship
had begun to talk, in a quite blas? way, about the kind of flat we
might be able to afford, through pooled income and joint mortgage; and
of the type of weddings it liked and disliked. The Relationship had
begun to buy books that neither of us would read, and had taken to
organising dinners with couples neither of us liked. Like a young child
learning to play with new Christmas toys, the Relationship was trying
things out, banging us together to see what would fit and what would
break. It had to be stopped.

All this, of course, I had known some time. Then, in the second that I
was offered the assignment by the Senior Partners, it all swung out of
my subconscious and into sharp focus. And I knew what I had to do. The
certain knowledge of what my accepting the role would do to the
Relationship, more that Shackles' crude hints that a successful
resolution of the matter would guarantee my quick ascension to the
partnership on, is what made the decision to accept so easy.

I had planned to tell her, though.
In the 4 weeks between accepting the job and the time (tomorrow!) that
I'm due to leave, I had planned to sit her down and tell her. Along
side the preparations I made, studying the documents, and bringing
myself up to date with the local political situation; in parallel to
making arrangements to have post forwarded and the flat sublet, I was
also planning the speech I would make, the how I would tell her. Some
alternate drafts:

- The thing is, it's really the best possible decision I can make in
terms of my career. And ultimately, that means its best for us to,
isn't it?

- Look, it probably won't be for more than six months, and that's not
so long. If we survive that - then, well, then we'll know we're meant
to be, won't we?

- Well, the work is going to be pretty intense, I'm not sure how much
time I'll even be able to spend with you if you came out. Wouldn't you
rather wait till the job is complete, and then we'll take a holiday
somewhere?

Note the cunning questioning style, deflecting the blame from me, onto
the Relationship, onto Us. This was to be a decision that we made for
the Relationship, together. For all my guile, though, it was my guts
that failed me in the end: I could never find a good time to bring it
up. And as days slipped into weeks, and somehow a line was crossed and
it became too late to tell her; when not telling her somehow became the
kinder course. This meant, of course, that I couldn't tell any of our
friends. Or, indeed, tell anyone at all. And now it was the night
before my flight, and still, as far as the London beyond the firm went,
it was JP as usual - my departure from city, flat, life, relationship
would go unheralded, uncelebrated, silently. I wondered how long it
would be before anyone other than Fiona even noticed I was gone.

*

I slip out of bed, careful lest she wake; my insomnia tonight will not
brook company, it's the other, angry loner, variety. Still naked from
our earlier, desultory sex, I pad out of the bedroom, and into the
kitchen. I open the fringe and enjoy the coldness on my skin.

There's nothing inside the fridge that even remotely appeals, but I
stand there anyway, for several full moments staring into its cabinet
as if into the night. The chill raises goose bumps all over my skin,
and then, a familiar sensation tells me, without the need to look down,
that something else also has been stirred by the cold.

Grabbing tissues en route, I head for the living room and settle into
my Father's chair: a huge reclining lazy boy which he bought me four
years ago. Ostensibly it was a housewarming present, but its true
purpose is to provide him with a familiar comfort for his infrequent
visits to London.

I hated it when it arrived, reeking as it did of him (my mother and he
have matching his-and-her ones in their bedroom) and age, so
incongruous with the rest of my oh-so-carefully-picked-fraiser-crane
furnishings. Yet now, I secretly prefer it to any of my own furniture.
It's become my TV chair, its broad arms providing ample shelter for the
welter of remote controls that breed in the warmth of my TV's
cathode-ray emissions.

Settling in, I flick back the recline lever, and flick on the TV. I
have the choice of free late night soft porn or "erotica" on three of
my twenty-seven basic Sky subscription channels. Keeping the volume
low, so not as to wake Fiona, I flip back and forth for a while,
choosing carefully.

(A quick pornographic meditation: Soft porn is a strange beast, it
depends heavily on the suspension of disbelief, and some cultures are
better at it than others. British soft porn tends to be truly, truly
awful stuff: totally devoid of any glamour or even fiction. It's all of
the investigative journalism school, crammed with titles like The
Making of 4 Sexy Nurses 9, or A Day in the Night of a Glamour
Model.

This is of course completely consistent with the rest of British
television output. Our sitcoms are pathetic, our soaps completely
devoid of glamour and in both categories, the Americans wipe the floor
with us. In news and documentaries, though, we're the best in the
world. Honourable and important as this strategy is in mainstream
television, though, in porn, it completely misses the point, and the
point is this: in sex shows we don't care about behind the scenes, it's
the full frontal we want.

The reason for this, beyond a boyish impatience for the cum shot, is
another simple truth: the sex industries are not very nice places. At
best exploitative, at worst criminally abusive, it is an industry run
by people motivated by the most primal and base of human drives: the
urge to be satiated without consideration for others, to feed every
desire of the mob, and by so doing become rich, and become powerful.
Those precepts of course hold true in many industries, but porn, like
the drug trade and prostitution, operates on the fringes of civilised
society, away from the checks and regulations of the norm. So
unfettered, base motives translate directly into base practice: here is
where evil can happen on a daily basis; where dreams of fame get
transmogrified into a career as a fluffer; where you are only as good
as your genitalia; where ambition turns to despair and innocence meets
its opposite.

Grotesque through the truth about the industry is, though, the porn
trade exists and will always exist because it fulfils a fundamentally
human, though uniquely male, need: the need to be spent. There is no
denying this need, there is no prohibiting, illegalising, suppressing
it. It will out. The only sensible approach from the law's point of
view is that of the Scandinavians: -make it as legal, as above board,
as regulated and as freely available as possible. Bring it from the
fringe to the centre, and in the centre let the base be balanced by
civilisation: compulsory AIDS tests for actors, unions and trade
regulations, and a completely transparency and absence of stigma to the
whole thing.

But I'm not approaching porn as a law maker, I'm a porn consumer. I'm a
man who wants, needs, loves porn - but I'm a sophisticated, liberal man
with a conscience as well as a dick. This presents me with a conflict.
A conflict extenuated by the British approach to soft porn. Why on
sweet gods' earth, would any one think I would want to peer behind the
bedroom scenes into the sad, pitiful, horrible lives of porn actors
(they aren't "stars" a star glows brightly and controls the terms of
the deal. No porn actress truly does that)? Why would I want to follow
them out into their hollow lives and see them do their groceries? Why
go into their homes, and hear their fake voices come out of their masks
as they try, through inane insights on sexiness or their taste in men,
attempt to present an illusion of normalcy, of health, of happiness?
Above all, why would I want to meet their parents and hear the twisted
rationalisations and lies they tell and believe in order to live with
the reality of their children's lives:

- Well, at first I wasn't too pleased - as you can well imagine - but
then, well, she assured me that it's all above board, and you know,
safe and everything, and well, what could I do, I'm only her mother
after all - and we're very proud of her now. Her father even has every
one of her movies on the shelf. Signed and everything.

What we, what I, want is to see is the illusion. I want to suspend
disbelief, to forget that these are real people driven to this by
desperate circumstances and abusive fathers. I want to see them glossed
up, hurts hidden, carefully choreographed on bedroom sets. Under
careful lighting, wearing faux-expensive clothes, moaning scripted
moans and most of all, naked: naked and sucking; licking and
fucking.

But yet, the British soft porn industry, stuck in some 19th century
moral masochist view of sexuality persists in making, instead of sex
films, sex documentaries. The Secret Life of a Porn Star - in which we
meet Sasha (no last name), a veteran of 12 years, 154 films and
countless STDs, who has 2 small children and a pet dog (called
Cocksucker - named for her ex-husband, a fag). The Making of Chuffy the
Vampire Fucker: where a clearly underage girl with dead eyes who
probably still has a Buffy doll at home, complains in a worldly tone
that the wooden stakes-dildos were very uncomfortable and left
splinters in inconvenient places. Most inconceivably I once caught a
few minutes of a special entitled Much Later with Drools Holebum, a
compilation show of porno soundtracks, MC-ed by a man who hums as he
cums.

It's as if too embarrassed to actually make sex fun, we have to do
sleazy and sordid instead of sexy; our Victorian heritage lives in Soho
still. Rant Over. Dismounting bugbear).

After some surfing amidst the free British dross, I give in and pay for
a one night only subscription on the Playboy channel (5.99, one night
only; The nature of the channel will not be referenced on your bill),
where two sisters (black/Asian/oriental in that kind of deliciously
multi-ethnic way that only Americans can do) are being much more than
usually fraternal.

Satisfied that I've found the best that tonight's TV schedule is going
to offer, I get to it. Without ceremony, without self-flagellating
foreplay, remote control in one fist, dick in the other, I crunch
myself to a quick orgasm.

As a circumcised man (a genetic, not a religious inheritance, males of
my father's family are blessed with unnecessarily generous foreskins,
which necessitate their own removal), I normally need baby oil to ease
the friction and smooth the passage between pain and pleasure. Tonight
I don't bother, tonight I'm an angry insomniac jerking and grunting my
way to sleep, the only way I know.

*

It seems to work, because its 5 am when I awake, still in the chair, my
loins a sticky mess of hair and tissue. My flight is at 9, the taxi
will be here in an hour. I shower, as hot as I can bear it, letting the
steam slip between my knotted muscles, preparing them for my long
flight. I get dressed in the bathroom, wanting to avoid the bedroom,
and Fiona's sleeping form, for as long as possible.

Eventually I have to go back and look at her. In her sleep, she's
smiling still. It seems impossible, completely unacceptable that she
can sleep and smile whilst I perform violence of this level on her. I
can think of only two circumstances in all the world where there is
such an incongruity between the safety of sleep and the potential of
violence: On the operating table, under anaesthetic in the hands of a
surgeon, and in the bed of your lover.

In either case, you're giving someone enormous power over your sleeping
body, the power to cut open your chest, prise apart your ribs and reach
in and squeeze your heart in their hands. The main difference is that
cardiac surgeons are trained and certified.

I take a blank sheet of paper from my desk, fold it in half and write
her name on the outside cover, above the fold. I want to write a note,
I owe her at least that, but as I pour over my desk I find no
satisfactory words. So I leave it there, her name unadorned, on a
folded blank sheet of paper. That way she'll know at least I
tried.

I pick up the bag I packed the night before, and step out to the street
to await the cab that will take me to Heathrow, and then to board the
plane that will fly me away through the pale blue London sky.

(c) Arvind Ethan David, 2002